The Ravine of Memory

153 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 1h55min.
The Nazis and their collaborators buried over 100,000 victims at Babyn Yar, a ravine in modern-day Ukraine. Most of the individuals were Jewish, making this area one of the most infamous mass murder sites in history. The Ravine of Memory starts when the travesty ends, telling the story of the ravine’s memory and forgetting in Soviet literature and culture—in Russian as well as in Yiddish. This book challenges the prevailing binary conceptions of Babyn Yar as exclusively a Holocaust or a “Great Patriotic War” story. It is neither the exclusive product of Soviet censorship nor individual dissidents. Babyn Yar is more than a physical space where untold horrors took place. Symbolically, it is the ultimate meeting point of so many disparate threads of Soviet culture: the state and the artist, the Jew and the non-Jew, and the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War. Ultimately, it is a place that reveals the frailty and courage of those who bear witness to atrocity.Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Babyn Yar Unearthed 1. Early Responses 2. The Thaw and the Memory of Babyn Yar 3. The Second Thaw 4. Babyn Yar Set to Music 5. Documentary in Content, Fictional in Form: Anatoly Kuznetsov 6. “Their Memory Is Alive”: Babyn Yar on the Soviet Yiddish Literary Scene 7. “Let Us Go There by Foot”: Itsik Kipnis 8. A Lullaby to Babyn Yar: Shike Driz 9. Between Marranos and Conversos: The Next Generation of Kyiv Yiddish Writers Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index About the Author